Erminia Colucci
Professor, Middlesex University London, United Kingdom

Dr. Erminia Colucci is Professor in Visual and Cultural Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Middlesex University London (UK) and a registered Clinical and Community Psychologist (Italy). She is also a Visiting Professor at Gadjah Mada University (Indonesia). Her main area of research and training is in Cultural and Global Mental Health (PhD in Cultural Psychiatry), and Visual Psychology (MPhil in Ethnographic Documentary), with a focus on low-middle income countries and immigrant and refugee populations. Her key interests are suicide and suicide prevention, human rights and mental health, domestic violence against women and children, child neglect/exploitation, spirituality and faith-based and spiritual/traditional healing, and first-hand stories of people with lived-experience of ‘mental illness’ and suicidal behaviour. Erminia is passionate about using arts-based and visual methods in her research, teaching and advocacy activities. Erminia is the founder of Movie-ment and Co-chair of the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry SIG on Arts, Mental Health and Human Rights.

Erminia has presented at various national/international conferences and published in several academic journals and books. She has won several competitive grants including two recent ESRC/AHRC-GCRF projects: one as Principle Investigator – Together for Mental health: Using collaborative visual research methods to understand experiences of mental illness, coercion and restraint in Ghana and Indonesia and collaborations between traditional/faith-based healing and mental health professionals– and another as Co-Investigator - Mental health literacy in urban and rural communities in Kerala, India: An interdisciplinary approach using applied theatre methodology.

A selection of her recent publications and more information can be found at https://www.mdx.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-directory/profile/colucci-erminia

You can follow Erminia on Twitter @Erminiacolucci @Movie_ment and Facebook @moviementorg

Arts-based and visual methods in activist mental health research in LMICs and among people from migrant and refugee backgrounds

Erminia Colucci

Starting with an overview of potential benefits (and limitations) of using arts-based and visual methods, the presenter will share reflections and examples from carrying out several applied and activist interdisciplinary research projects using a range of arts-based and visual methodologies interdisciplinary projects about mental health/illness and suicidal behaviour in LMIC such as Indonesia, India, Ghana, Australia and the Philippines, and among people from migrant and refugee backgrounds. In particular, she will present about her recent UK ESRC/GCRF-funded project “Together for Mental Health: Using collaborative visual research methods to understand experiences of mental illness, coercion and restraint in Ghana and Indonesia”, which used ethnographic film and visual participatory methods to explore collaboration between mental health workers and faith-based and traditional healers to prevent the use of coercion and provide care for persons affected by mental illness. The speaker will also provide examples from a variety of projects where the participants/storytellers were directly involved in creating and making (i.e. filming, editing, distributing) their stories using a range of techniques (from collaborative filming to digital storytelling to participatory video). She will conclude by sharing her reflections on using creative forms of engagement to ignite social and system changes.

Anikó Gregor

Associate Professor, ELTE University, Hungary

Anikó Gregor, Ph.D. is a sociologist working as an associate professor at ELTE University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Social Research Methodology. She received her MA in Gender Studies (Central European University, Budapest, 2011) and Sociology (ELTE University, Budapest, 2007), and holds a PhD in Sociology (ELTE University, Budapest, 2015). In her academic job, she teaches seminars in both qualitative and quantitative methods at BA, MA, and PhD levels. Besides research methodology, she holds introductory lectures and seminars in the field of the sociology of gender relations for students in Sociology and International Relations programs. Between 2014 and 2020, she was in charge of, as a program coordinator and later as a vice program director, the Gender Studies MA program at ELTE, terminated by a governmental decree in 2018. In the academic year of 2019/2020, she was a visiting research fellow at Freie Universität, Berlin, in the 'Academy in Exile' program. In her research, she focuses on the effect of neoliberalism on gender relations and inequalities, especially from an East-Central European and semi-peripherical perspective. Her recent publications deal with the history of the porn industry in Hungary ("Pornification as Westernization on the semi-periphery: The history of the Hungarian 'porn boom' in the 1990s", Sexualities, co-authored by Gergely Csányi and Fanni Dés), and the role of familism in the academia and the NGO sector in assisting familial discourses in politics ("Restoring what never existed: the role of familism in the narratives of return in Hungary", East European Politics and Societies and Cultures, in press, co-authored by Ingrid Verebes).

About the unequal social distribution of uncertainty 

Anikó Gregor

Politics supporting the economic model relying on the increasing exploitation of the Earth's human and (recently, of space's, too) natural resources became part of the everyday reality of many in the forms of permanent crises tendencies. The negative consequences of such politics have been affecting humans living not just in the so-called Global South, Global East, but more recently, in the Global North. The weight of different social tensions is experienced unequally by the people not just along the east-west or the north-south divisions but in a local intersection of gender, class, and race structures as well. The cycles of permanent and multiple crises (economic, ecological, political, humanitarian, health, etc. crises) constantly reshape the fundamental structures of societies and increase the volume of unequal resource exchange between social groups, and by doing that, deepen the problems of social inequality.

This has a remarkable impact on individuals' mental health and the unequal distribution of mental health risk factors across different social groups. Just as the individual's physical health, the person's mental health depends on the social factors affecting the person's life chances and choices. Existential anxiety, feelings of vulnerability, and insecurity are unevenly distributed among members of society, depending on their position in the power structure of society. There is also an uneven distribution of tools that could help to cope with uncertainty. Moreover, as a consequence of the different austerity policies and the constant withdrawal of the welfare state structures (if they existed in some places at all), people are increasingly unable to rely on public services, whether state, civil, or other community-supported, that can meaningfully mitigate the lifelong damaging effects of the abovementioned processes. Structural tensions take the form of individual symptoms, require individual coping strategies, and can drastically affect individuals' physical and mental health and well-being.

The talk will problematize whether mental health research can ignore the impact of the institutional and broader political-economic structures surrounding individuals. What do we lose from an epistemological perspective if we only remain at the micro (individual) level in our research? What apparatus does qualitative research have to reflect institutional (meso-level) and macro-level processes from data sources collected at the individual level? What hinders exploring macro processes in the mainstream logic of scientific knowledge production, not just on mental health, but on any other social phenomenon? What can we do as researchers, let us work in different disciplines, to overcome these barriers and to provide a complex understanding of the subject of our research? What interdisciplinary attempts have been made in recent years to cover the blind spots of the structural embeddedness of mental health in society?

Travelling in time: using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to examine temporal
aspects of the personal experience of mental health issues

Jonathan A Smith

In this talk I will explore the ways in which experiential qualitative methodology can be used to engage with the dynamic temporal qualities of mental health. I will do this by drawing on a number of studies I have conducted which have employed interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to conduct detailed examination of these processes. The studies I will consider have explored: the psychologically debilitating consequences of chronic pain; the long-term impact of multi-systemic therapy; the effectiveness of a modified CBT intervention for young people with epilepsy and mental health difficulties. I will consider different conceptualizations of temporal and longitudinal occurring in this type of qualitative work.

Eleftheria Tseliou
Professor, University of Thessaly, Greece

Eleftheria Tseliou is Professor of Research Methodology and Qualitative Methods at the University of Thessaly, Greece. She holds a BA in Philosophy, Education and Psychology and an MSc in Clinical Psychology from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She also holds an MSc in Family Therapy and a Ph.D. in Psychology from King’s College, University of London. For her Ph.D. studies she was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship. She is President Elect of the Association of European Qualitative Researchers in Psychology (EQuiP) and chaired the 1st EQuiP conference. Eleftheria has more than 60 publications including articles in peer-reviewed international Journals and book chapters. She has co-edited special issues for the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy and for Qualitative Research in Psychology. Eleftheria has also co-edited Education as Social Construction and is currently co-editing the Routledge International Handbook of Innovative Qualitative Psychological Research and the Routledge International Handbook of Postmodern Therapies. She is also member of the editorial board of Family Process, the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy and Frontiers in Psychology-Psychology for Clinical Settings. Her research interests include the development of discursive qualitative methodologies like discourse analysis and conversation analysis, of qualitative meta-synthesis review methodologies and the study of counseling/psychotherapy processes.

Knowing in context:

The contribution of discursive research methodologies to living with uncertainty in mental health clinical practice

Eleftheria Tseliou

Inspired by the conference theme, in this talk I will argue that research employing qualitative, discursive methodologies adopting a social epistemology approach can contribute to living with uncertainty in mental health clinical practice from a perspective of knowing in context. With regard to scientific knowledge, post-modern epistemological approaches and related methodologies have celebrated uncertainty, suggesting that we can reach no single, certain or absolute knowledge/truth about phenomena, including mental health clinical practice. Similarly, systemic, dialogic and collaborative approaches to psychotherapy have celebrated the tolerance of uncertainty, regarding the understanding and treatment of mental distress. On the other hand, societal challenges, like contemporary multi-faceted crises and related inequalities or global health threats like the COVID-19 pandemic remind us of the broader societal, ideological and political context of clinical practice, and flag the need for knowledge certainties to cope with fluidity and change. In my talk, I will start with an illustration of key features of discursive research methodologies, that is of methodologies espousing a contextualized view of language use, highlighting its performative and intersubjective aspects. I will discuss the employment of such methodologies in mental health clinical practice research, focusing on their strengths and limitations. I will then share examples from research projects, where I have engaged with methodologies like critical discursive psychology, conversation analysis or qualitative meta-synthesis, focusing on the study of discursive processes in systemic and constructionist psychotherapeutic approaches and on the study of how power intersects with clinical practice and psychotherapeutic dialogue. While doing so, I will share reflections on how putting to the fore (discursive) research as a means to construct knowledge in context could facilitate a “both/and” approach to uncertainty in clinical practice, that is an approach which celebrates an alternation between reaching and questioning certainties. I will argue that discursive methodologies adopting a social epistemology perspective, that is, a perspective situating knowledge construction within social context, could play a role to undertaking such a “living with uncertainty” approach in mental health clinical practice.

Tamás Ullmann
Professor, ELTE University, Hungary

Tamás Ullmann (1966) is Professor of Philosophy at ELTE Institute of Philosophy. He has obtained DSc in Philosophy at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2015, habilitation at ELTE University of Budapest in 2010, and PhD at the University of Sorbonne Paris I. in 2001. He studied Philosophy at ELTE University of Budapest and at the University of Sorbonne Paris I. He had scholarships in Paris several times, in Vienna at IWM, in Edinburgh Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, in Leuven at the Husserl Archives.
His research fields are Kant and German Idealism, Phenomenology, French philosophy in XXth Century, Psychoanalysis and Critical social philosophy.
He is actually editor of Hungarian Philosophical Quarterly (Magyar Filozófiai Szemle), chief editor of Aspecto (Philosophical review of Hungarian Phenomenological Society), president of Hungarian Phenomenological Society and director of Doctoral School of the Institute of Philosophy at ELTE. He published
• La genèse du sens. Signification et expérience dans la phénoménologie génétique de Husserl;
• A láthatatlan forma. Sematizmus és intencionalitás. (The Invisible Form. Schematism and Intentionality);
• With Csaba Olay: Kontinentális filozófia a XX. században. (XXth Century Continental Philosophy);
• Az értelem dimenziói. Válogatott tanulmányok. (Dimensions of sense).
• Túl a jelentésen. Sematizmus és intencionalitás II. (Beyond Meaning);
Currently he is preparing a book on phenomenology of unconscious (forthcoming in 2024).

Uncertainty and existential thinking

Tamás Ullmann

Classical and modern existentialism faced individual situations of uncenrtainty: anxiety, despair, absurdity, depersonalisation, derealisation, etc. Nevertheless existentialism considered human existential problems as untimely the same: according to Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre we are supposed to experience anxiety in the same way as the ancient greeks did. I would like to show the illusiory character of this presupposition. Human existential problems evolve with historical changes and with social transformations. From the holistic perspective of a bio-psycho-sociological approach I would like to concentrate on the psycho-sociological relations. Not only psychological problems (f. ex. mental illnesses) are unseparable from social background, but existential problems as well. We experience our problems in a different way as our parents and gandparents, because our problems are different. Its obvious that there are apprently eternal human problems (death, love, survival, etc.), but we face death in differentsocial and institutional context, we experience love according to different cultural codes, we struggle for survival in different oceonomical situations. That is the way we can speak about a certain „social unconscious”. The imperatives of the superego and the ideal ego have been changed constantly, and what is more: they have been changing more and more quickly in the last decades. I would like to show that this transformation has a serious impact on our feeling of increasing uncertainty and it influences our concept of authentic life and our concept of happiness.